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New CASS Partnership to Work on Mapping Online Far-Right Networks
Research staff from the ESRC-Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), Lancaster University and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), King’s College London begin 2015 by undertaking a joint research project which aims to map the networks in which UK-based far-right Twitter accounts operate. The research team is…
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Sweepyface: a linguistic profile
This morning brought news of the suicide of a media-branded ‘troll’[1]. Brenda Leyland, the 63 year-old woman behind the @sweepyface Twitter account, a self-proclaimed “researcher” and “anti-McCann” advocate was found dead at a Marriott hotel on Saturday 4th October in Leicester. She was recently contacted by a reporter at Sky News regarding her Twitter activity…
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Discourses of Online Misogyny
Indexing reporting and conversations about rape in online social media: India after the 2012 Delhi gang rape New partners: CASS, Lancaster University and Fields of View, India (Left to right: Onkar Hoysala, Fields of View; Mark McGlashan, CASS; Sruthi Krishnan, Fields of View) The reporting of incidents of rape of women by (typically groups of)…
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Twitter’s reaction to the Benefits Britain live debate
Benefits Street was a series of television programmes broadcast by the Channel 4 outlet between 6th January and 10th February 2014 which, as Channel 4 have claimed, “sparked a national conversation about Britain’s welfare system”. The programme focussed on a community of people living in the economically deprived area of Winson Green, Birmingham and specifically…
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Two plead guilty over Twitter rape threats
Trial Tuesday 7th January saw John Nimmo and Isabella Sorley plead guilty to sending messages “menacing” in nature to Feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez and Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy via multiple Twitter accounts. In July 2013, Criado-Perez had been successful in campaigning for author Jane Austen to appear on the £10 bank note. Shortly after in…
CASS Briefings
CASS: Briefings is a series of short, quick reads on the work being done at the ESRC/CASS research centre at Lancaster University, UK.